Food Price Crowdsourcing Africa

“Food Price Crowdsourcing Africa” (FPCA) is a research project led by the European Commission - Directorate Joint Research Centre (JRC), and implemented in collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Nigeria and Wageningen University and Research (WUR), The Netherlands, to understand food price changes along the food chain while strengthening agricultural & market information systems through mobile phone technology and citizens' participation. This project is a component of a broader initiative themed "Support to the AgRi-Economic analysis & modelling of agriculture & development policies impact for Africa (AREA)", which is led and funded by the JRC and implemented in collaboration with WUR. As society and economy rapidly transforms by the expansion of digital technologies, new data sources represent a unique opportunity to produce new and complementary statistics within collective collaborative frameworks. The goal of this project (~10 months) was to explore the potentiality of a “spontaneous crowdsourcing” (i.e. “Citizen Science”) approach by leveraging citizen involvement, smart phone technology and an adequate quality framework to produce reliable food price data with very high spatial details and temporal frequency, with the purpose to provide to consumers and farmers accurate and timely information on agricultural commodity markets, allowing them to make informed decisions about consumption and production and leading to a more efficient function of markets. Agricultural markets transparency is particularly relevant in many African countries where agriculture is still the main source of income for a big share of population as well as expenditure on food represents an important share of the total household income. At the same time market transparency can help to understand market dynamics and so to shape national and regional decisions and policies regarding food security and markets. The dataset is continuously updated for the whole the duration of the project. The dataset is accompanied by an interactive dashboard updated twice a day that allows users to perform a wide exploration of the data. A set of graphs and charts are displayed according to states and regions, weeks, and products selected by the user. This is considered a beta version: user feedback is welcome to further improve the dashboard.